• Happy End

5/11/24 (Sat)

Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky’s time-bending 1967 feature opens with the words “The End” followed by the end titles, some in mirror image. Then a disembodied head jumps out of a basket and reattaches itself to a body slumped over a guillotine as the blade flies upward. The man revives and is led back into jail, and the story begins, or more properly, heads backward toward its beginning.

We learn eventually that, in real life, a butcher has caught his wife with her lover and murdered them, throwing the latter out a window and gruesomely dismembering the woman with a knife. But the narrator – apparently speaking from the dead, a la Sunset Boulevard – relates events only as he sees them: the un-guillotining of the man is his birth, and he is seen putting his wife’s sliced-off parts together and giving her life. Unlike other reversed stories like the later Memento or Betrayal, the film here is actually run backwards, so that a newborn child is shown being sucked back into the womb (the narrator says sadly that the child is dying), or a man thrown from a building is shown rising up to the original spot.

The dialogue is spoken normally but shown in reverse sequence, creating some uproarious distortions. (A few lines are delivered backwards by, appropriately enough, government officials.) In real time, the twitchy groom assures the priest that he is fine, then says “I do” to the marriage vow. But here is how that comes out:

Priest: “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wife?”

Man: “No.”

Priest: “Are you uncomfortable?”

Much of the hilarity comes from this careful juxtaposition, forcing us constantly to keep up with what we hear vs. what is really being said. (Similarly, at the execution ground: “Be brave my son. You’ll meet our lord.” “Disgusting.” “How’s the cigarette?”) The world is turned upside down: people walk backwards, a rhinoceros in the zoo throws food to the spectators (the narrator: “Stealing from a bank is one thing, but taking from a poor hippo…”), a stripper puts her clothes on, people dive from the water  back onto the shore, wine is spit out back into the glass. The narrator proudly relates how he returned his bride to virginity, and a family feud is reversed into happier times. Having put the dismembered woman back together at the beginning, the man later throws her into a building fire. That is, instead of saving her from the fire and later cutting her up, the reverse is shown and explained away by the narrator as if it were the perfectly normal and correct order. The narrator only knows what he is shown and responds accordingly; logic tells us one thing, the narrator another. “Happy End” (the English is the original title) is of course ironic: while the actual ending is the execution, the ending in the film’s sequence is the man’s birth — seen by the narrator as his quiet death. 

Aside from the dialogue, the filming undercuts the seriousness of the murder story in every way, such as the lovers framed against a group of mooing cows. My favorite sequence is where the woman and her lover are eating cookies while eyeing each other in suggestively campy fashion, which in this world means pieces emerging from their mouths un-chewed and forming back into a whole cookie. It feels like a parody of the famous seductive eating scene from Tom Jones a few years earlier.

Vladimir Mensik, a highly prolific Czech actor, gives a spot-on performance as Bedrich. He enjoys brilliant support from Jaroslava Obermaierova as the wife and Josef Abrham as the lover.

Helped by the film’s relative brevity (70 minutes), the concept never grows old. I had a ball. The film is not available through any normal channels; I watched a Russian download with some questionable subtitles. I’m sure we miss a lot of the Czech humor as it is; for example, the name of the main character, Bedrich Frydrych, is apparently a joke on the lines of “Frederick Frederick” (as in the composer Bedrich Smetana, born Frydrych). Given that the humor derives largely from the contrast between the narration, which describes what we see before our eyes, and what we know to be the real story, the subtitles are particularly important here. (I notice that a number of Japanese commentators who didn’t have access to subtitles expressed boredom with the film.) So I’d like to see this again with proper titles – heck, I’d like to see it again anyway. Inventive, offbeat, tongue firmly in cheek. It’s often called Dadaist, which sounds right, the film equivalent of Duchamp’s urinal. Though produced during the fertile period of the Czech New Wave, it is really in a class of its own. Highly recommended.